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"An admirable and ambitious paintings of synthesis that might supply perception and pride to millions of lay readers."
THE WASHINGTON submit publication WORLD

In this stunningly clever ebook, Karen Armstrong, certainly one of Britain's best commentators on non secular affairs, strains the background of ways women and men have perceived and skilled God, from the time of Abraham to the current. From classical philsophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the fashionable age of skepticism, Karen Armstrong plays the close to miracle of distilling the highbrow historical past of monotheism into one beautifully readable quantity, destined to take its position as a vintage.

As non secular violence flares around the globe, we're faced with an acute hassle: Can humans coexist in peace whilst their easy ideals are irreconcilable? Benjamin Kaplan responds by means of taking us again to early smooth Europe, whilst the difficulty of spiritual toleration was once no much less urgent than it's at the present time.

During this broad-ranging inquiry into ritual and its relation to put, Jonathan Z. Smith prepares the best way for a brand new method of the comparative research of faith. Smith stresses the significance of place—in specific, developed ritual environments—to a formal knowing of the ways that "empty" activities turn into rituals.

2012 AJN (American magazine of Nursing) e-book of the 12 months Award within the Hospice and Palliative Care categoryExplores how non secular understandings of loss of life are skilled in hospice care. within the Nineteen Sixties, English surgeon and devoted Christian Cicely Saunders brought a brand new means of treating the terminally ailing that she referred to as “hospice care.

Extra resources for A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

Example text

Flory and Miller do much to destroy such stereotypes. The spiritual questing of these Reclaimers relates to a need to find a point of stability in the flux of life. Their spiritual quests reflect a recovery of tradition, notably in liturgy which caters for their visual and ritual needs. The indefiniteness of postmodern life and the rootlessness of their culture, with its endless capacities for experimentation, generate an emptiness that can be resolved by a rooting in tradition. The very elements of subjectivity and expressiveness that takes a turn into holistic spirituality can also effect movement in the opposite direction, as in the case of these Reclaimers in California.

He well indicates that the ‘return’ to spirituality within organised religions such as Catholicism is by no means new, but is endemic in its traditions. The dilemmas these ‘returns’ effect are by no means new. But what is new is the sociological realisation of the importance of spirituality emerging as a cultural need in Italian society, a point only grasped as recently as 2003. In Giordan’s perspective, spirituality is attached to religion, but in an unofficial almost residual form, where Catholicism can still make claims on Italian cultural sensibilities and the needs of identity that underpin these.

Both indicate a common response to a felt loss of social capital. Unlike the Reclaimers, the Innovators seem almost indifferent to their worshipping settings. Oddly, their visual expectations do not move in that direction. Non-institutional and non-hierarchical, Innovators seem to abhor the authority in their spiritual forms that the reclaimers seek. In their notion of embodied spirituality, Flory and Miller seek to move beyond past notions of individualistic spiritualities and into communal settings.